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Geometry Wars is a casual game, but it's not the kind of game you play casually. It's the kind of game you play on the edge of your seat, your gnarled hands making visible dents in the controller as the adrenaline pumping through your body makes you shake. It's the kind of game that makes you cry out and throw the controller down when you lose, only to pick it up again and try to beat your high score in just "one more game."
In other words, it's the kind of game they don't make much anymore.
No wonder the game has quickly become Xbox Live Arcade's killer app, selling 45,000 copies through January 2006, more than any other Xbox Live Arcade game to that point. The game isn't wholly unique - the actual mechanics resemble arcade classics like Robotron 2084 and Smash TV - but the simplistic, addictive gameplay is unique on a system known more for expansive, graphically intense epics, and that is what has made it a winner, both critically and commerically.
The actual gameplay in Geometry Wars couldn't be simpler. You control a small white spaceship amid a black field full of colorful floating shapes. The left analog stick controls your ship's movement, while the right analog stick controls the direction of your fire. The shoulder buttons set off a limited supply of screen-clearing smart bombs.
Surviving long enough earns you score multipliers, which makes it easier to earn extra ships and bombs as you go. Like the classic arcade games of the eighties, the only goal is survival and a place on the high score table at the end of the game (only now the high score table is an Internet linked international ranking)
Things start off easily enough -- purple pinwheels and blue diamonds float lazily towards you ship, just begging to be picked off. Things pickup pretty quickly, though, with green squares that erratically dance away from your shots and pink ones that split into three smaller, spiraling enemies when they're destroyed. If you can survive those, you'll run into long orange snakes with vulnerable purple heads and red circles that drag you into their gravity wells.
After only a few minutes of play, the screen is so full of enemies that the games starts to look like a prime cause of attention deficit disorder. Swarming enemies force you to constantly keep moving, and it always feels like you're right on the edge of disaster. Sometimes you'll manage to wriggle your way out of a particularly impossible looking situation, other times you'll be picked off by an enemy you didn't even see amid the chaos.
This gets into the key problem with Geometry Wars -- for many players, it may be too much of a good thing. While the frenetic pacing and non-stop action makes for some thrilling moments, it can also make for some frustratingly short games for players with slower reflexes. Practice can help with this problem, but it's easy to hit a plateau where it's hard to do much better. Players should be sure they can consistently survive the four minute demo before they decide to buy the full version of the game.
If you can last, though, Geometry Wars is one of the most addicting experiences available on the young Xbox 360. The basic gameplay gets kind of repetitive, but the constant thrills will keep you coming back just to get to that next scoring milestone.